Relief vs. Despair

November 5, 2012

On Election Night 2000, I was in Australia and it was Wednesday morning already. Therefore, we were confident that we’d know the results long before the day was over. Unfortunately, we were wrong, and as the day went on, it became clear that we wouldn’t know who won any time soon.

By the time the dust had settled on all the recount madness more than a month later and George W. Bush was declared the winner, what many of us felt was more a sense of relief than joy. The country had dodged a bullet then, and hopefully will dodge another, even more lethal one this time. But as a blogger stated eloquently about this election’s outcome, even if Romney wins and gets a Republican Senate and House, he will face a hostile triumvirate of still-powerful institutions—the press; the education system, in particular the colleges and universities; and the entertainment industry.

Entertainment these days is exemplified by the late night shows which, in Glenn Beck’s vernacular, provide a fusion of entertainment and “enlightenment” to their largely youthful audiences. A recent Fox News article stated that the late night shows’ candidate jokes were running close to 3:1 Romney to Obama. But the quantity differential only tells part of the story. No doubt, the anti-Romney zingers were far more barbed than the vast majority of puffball jokes aimed at Obama. And yes, however unfortunately, these things do influence people. This triumvirate, the media in particular, have shaped Obama’s presidency to look nowhere near as disastrous as it has actually been. How else can anyone explain Obama’s continued close to 50 percent popularity rating and about the same percentage in the election polls? It remains to be seen if the election will validate the media/entertainment juggernaut’s work, or repudiate it. I have the feeling that the real result will fall somewhere in between, that although it could be a solid win for Romney, it won’t be a landslide. And that’s too bad if a win short of a landslide happens, because the utterly disgraceful “mainstream” media will then live to fight another day with their credibility not tarnished enough to change their biased ways.

Now for the despair part, if Obama manages somehow to have hoodwinked enough honest voters, and collected enough dishonest ones to win re-election. Just as we shouldn’t get too high about a Romney win, we accordingly shouldn’t allow ourselves to get too despondent over Obama winning again. Yes, we’ve heard a million times that we will have crossed the Rubicon and can kiss the America we’ve known and loved good-bye forever in an Obama second term. But let’s face it—we’re already living in an America that is vastly different than it was even 10 years ago, let alone 30 or 50 years. Romney will only be able to do just so much to yank us back to some semblance of what we were, should he win. And Obama will most likely not be able to implement the worst of his intentions no matter how much even a squeaker of a win will have his minions thumping their chests and proclaiming his “mandate.”

In the end, regardless of who wins, it is God who is ultimately in control, even though at times that seems less so than ever. The failure of progressivism, here and elsewhere, is in the progressive elites’ insistence that man is perfectible and a heavenly utopia can be attained here on Earth—in other words, we can do it without God. We’ve seen over the last hundred years how that has worked. Now more than ever, America’s truest, best, and last hope is in returning to Him. As critical as this election is, a good result is merely a first step in that direction.